It didn't take long for someone to refute John Edwards' claim that he only started sleeping with Rielle Hunter, the mistress whom he didn't love but liked enough to cheat on his dying wife with, after he paid her $114,000 to produce Internet campaign videos for him back in July 2006.
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein already reported that he had e-mails in which Hunter describes "being in love with a (still somewhat dysfunctional) married man" she calls "my love lips" which she sent in early April of that year, and which contradict Edwards' carefully crafted time line. Now, a friend of Hunter's named Pigeon O'Brien is claiming that "the affair began long, long, long before she was hired to work for the campaign—almost half a year before she was hired to work on those videos." (Judging from the quotes in both stories, it looks like O'Brien was Stein's source as well, unless of course Hunter blabbed to pretty much everyone she knew about the affair using the same phrases, which is certainly possible.)